It is more like O(a^(n/b))

No, factorization is more like O(a^(n^b)). For GNFS on RSA-sized inputs, 1000^(n^(1/3) - 2.5) is a good estimate of the number of operations required.

In my dictionary, atheism is defined as "Disbelief in, or denial of, the existence of a God". This is quite distinct from the position of agnosticism, which states that we do not know if there is a God.

The fact that Atheism has a very limited set of beliefs -- namely one, "There is no God" -- doesn't make it any less of a religion.

Apparently the partial question didn't stop people from voting on

Jurists != Jurors.

A jurist usually means anyone with a law degree, although in some countries it is generally reserved to refer to judges.

Wow, an AC is accusing me of being a troll. Never had that happen before.

Tarsnap solves a completely different problem from EncFS, loop-aes, and dmcrypt. Those are tools for encrypted local storage; Tarsnap is a solution for encrypted backups.

I'm not sure what part of the world you're from, but in UTC we're still at December 27th, so the month isn't over yet. I'll known how much money Tarsnap made in December a few hours after 2010-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (since Tarsnap's financial year is January-December UTC), at which point I'll send the money over to the Foundation, a few hours before the end of their year (since they work on a January-December MST year).

And no, it won't be zero. Before announcing this earlier in the month, I checked with the FreeBSD Foundation and gave them an estimate of how much money they would be receiving, and they were perfectly satisfied with it.

Because rsync, sshfs, rdiff-backup, etc. aren't secure. With any of those, your service provider has access to your unencrypted data; with Tarsnap, I have no way to read your files -- or your file names, file sizes, directory tree structure, or even figure out how many files you have stored.

I'm donating all of the profits my Tarsnap online backup system makes for December to the FreeBSD Foundation. As a FreeBSD developer I find the work done by the FreeBSD Foundation to be invaluable, and Tarsnap has benefitted greatly from work done within FreeBSD, so I figured this was a good way of giving back.

I have the opposite problem: Due to excessive caffeine intake and zero exercise, my resting pulse is normally around 95. Add in a bit of white coat hypertension, and it easily goes over 100.

I've tried to donate blood twice, and in both cases a nurse has measured my pulse and then told me that they don't want my blood -- apparently (in Canada, at least) a pulse over 100 translates to "we can't take your blood because it might make you faint".

Good point... come to think of it, I'm not sure how it's possible to do that even with a source upgrade, since trying to run an 8.0 world on a 7.x kernel would break too.

Thanks for the kind words -- I certainly should be able to write coherent instructions for doing a binary upgrade, though, given that I wrote FreeBSD Update. :-)

Are you running into the "need to create wlan0 instead of using the wifi device directly in 8.0" change? This has tripped up a lot of people.

We all know that slashdotters don't rtfa, but he'll probably get some traffic from people who aren't regular slashdot readers and don't know how things work around here.

I should also add that one link the submitter didn't include was instructions for upgrading to FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE from a previous release: http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2009-07-11-freebsd-update-to-8.0-beta1.html (obviously, apply s/8.0-BETA1/8.0-RELEASE/ to the instructions).

Before anyone asks, yes, that link is on my personal website -- but no, I'm not just posting it here to drive traffic in my direction. That link is going to be in the official release announcement too.